First Paper in ASHRM Series: Defining, Examining Serious Safety Events

​Healthcare organizations, including skilled nursing facilities and home care agencies, must adopt a common definition for serious safety events if they are to achieve their goal of eliminating such events from their organizations, says a newly released white paper, "Serious Safety Events: Getting to Zero," from the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM). Released at ASHRM's annual conference in Washington, DC, October 7 to 10, 2012, the white paper defines a serious safety event as "a deviation from generally accepted practice or process that reaches the patient and causes severe harm or death."